Attack table
One Roll Theory In June of 2005, a Blizzard representative made the following statement: :"The way WoW calculates crit rate is over ALL attacks. Crit rate is not based on hits only. In other words, if you have a 5% crit rate, that 5% chance includes misses." Based on the implications of this statement, it has been suggested by some players that the result of every melee or ranged attack is decided based on a single server-generated random number (a single "die roll" made internally on the server), checked against a server-side internal table for the attack. Single Table Theory Tables For Melee Attacks By Mobs, and Melee Auto-Attacks By Players The following tables are laid out in descending order of the precedence of one attack result over another. That is to say, the entries at the top of the table take precedence over the entries below them. (This precedence order is from Blizzard, and as such is accurate.) What this table means is this: * Every melee attack (except for yellow-damage special attacks dealt by players, as described in the next section) has a chance to miss, to be dodged, to be parried, to be blocked, to be a glancing blow, to be a critical, and to be a crushing blow. Anything left over is an ordinary hit. * The chances listed in your general spellbook tab (for you to Dodge, Parry, or Block) are absolute percentages. If you have a listed dodge chance of 4.5%, then on average 4.5% of all melee attacks made against you by a mob of equal level will be dodged, not merely 4.5% of those melee attacks that didn't miss you. * Some melee attacks have a 0% chance for some of these attack results; e.g., an auto-attack made by a player has a 0% chance of being a crushing blow, an attack made by a mob has a 0% chance of being a glancing blow, an attack made against a player without a shield has a 0% chance of being blocked, etc.. * For mob and white-damage melee attacks, there is no such thing as a blocked crushing blow, a parried crit, a missed glancing blow, etc.. All of these possible attack results are mutually exclusive. * If the total chances of all the entries above the bottom of the table reach or exceed 100%, the attack cannot be an ordinary hit. * If the total combined chance of a miss, dodge, parry, or block is 100% or higher (as in the case of a well-geared warrior using Shield Block), not only can the attack not be an ordinary hit, the attack also cannot be a crit or a crushing blow. Example 1 Suppose a mob of equal level is attacking your warrior character in melee. Your Defense skill is maxed out for your level, but has no other bonuses. In the general tab of your spell book, you see that your listed Dodge chance is 4.5%, your listed Parry chance is 6.2%, and your listed Block chance (you have your shield equipped) is 5.1%. For the mob attacking you, its attack table will look like this: Now say that you elect to activate this warrior's Shield Block skill. Shield Block increases the warrior's Block chance by an additional 75%. For the next attack against your warrior, the mob's attack table now looks like this: Note that the chance of an ordinary hit has been removed from the possible attack results entirely, and the chance of a Critical hit has been reduced somewhat. Example 2 Elliot the Rogue is level 60, and is attacking a boss mob along with the rest of his raid group. He has stocked up on all sorts of +crit gear, so his crit chance against the boss mob is a whopping 30%. Since he is dual-wielding, he incurs an additional +19% miss chance on every autoattack swing; and although his +5 weapon skill gear does counter a little bit of this, he did not bring any +hit gear with him, so his miss chance against a boss mob is 24.4%. (+Hit gear doesn't directly increase your chance of a hit; instead, it reduces your chance of a miss.) When he attacks the boss mob from the front, Elliot's attack table looks like this: Note that despite his nominal "crit chance" of 30%, his miss chance from dual-wielding and his glancing blow chance due to the boss's high level mean that only 19.4% of his attacks are going to be critical hits. This conundrum is sometimes referred to as the Crit Cap -- his chance to crit is capped at 19.4%, so 10.6% of his +crit bonus is wasted. Realizing his stupidity, Elliot maneuvers around behind the boss mob to continue his attacks. From behind, a mob cannot parry or block, so Elliot's attack table now looks like this: Now that he's behind the boss mob, Elliot decides to Backstab it. A Backstab is an instant attack. Instant attacks do not incur the +19% miss penalty for dual-wielding, nor can they be Glancing Blows. If Backstab were a white-damage attack, which it is not, Elliot's attack table would look like this: Example 3 Oh no! Elliot the Rogue has backstabbed the boss mob too hard, and has drawn aggro. The boss whirls around and raises his enourmous fist in the air, threatening to pound poor little leather-clad Elliot into paste. Elliot's Agility and Lightning Reflexes talent do give him a decent dodge chance, and his Deflection talent boosts his parry chance; but he has no gear that boosts his Defense skill beyond its unbuffed value of 300. On the whole, things look grim. The boss mob's attack table against Elliot looks like this: Thinking quickly, Elliot activates his Evasion skill. This gives a whopping +50% increase to his Dodge chance. The mob's attack table now looks like this: Melee special attacks by players Melee special attacks, also called "Yellow-damage" melee attacks due to the color of their combat log entries and on-screen damage numbers, are not resolved the same way as white-damage melee attacks. Yellow damage attacks include all instant attacks (such as Overpower and Backstab) and all on-next-swing special attacks (such as Heroic Strike and Cleave). The exact mechanism by which special attacks are resolved is not yet known. What is known, however, is that a special attack made against a mob or a shield-carrying player can be blocked and be a crit at the same time. This result is impossible under the mutually-exclusive attack results table described in the preceding section. Two-roll theory for melee special attacks In a discussion thread at http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=9330 , a user named Vulajin kept track of his critical hit rate over many many Backstabs. He corrected for all possible factors he could think of, and in the end discovered that the rate he got was consistent with his attack being resolved using two die rolls: A first roll to determine whether the attack missed (using the assumed miss chance for the mob targets he was attacking), and a second roll to determine whether an attack that didn't miss was a critical hit (using his tooltip Crit chance adjusted for the mob target's level). If his data are accurate, and if the game mechanics for yellow-damage attacks haven't changed since the time that discussion thread was written, then there are at least two random numbers generated to determine the outcome of special attacks. It is unfortunate, though, that these tests were done with Backstab and not with a special attack that can be made against a mob from the front, e.g. Sinister Strike or Heroic Strike. Such data would be more useful, because attacks from the front can be dodged, parried, and blocked. The Table for Ranged Attacks A ranged attack cannot result in a dodge, parry, or glancing blow. (On their test realms at one point, Blizzard experimented with allowing a small dodge chance against ranged attacks, but this was considered too harmful to Hunters and the experiment was abandoned.) Thus, the attack result table for ranged attacks reduces to the following: Attack spells Spells do not use the above tables. The result of casting a spell against a target are determined in an entirely different manner. See Formulas:Spell hit chance. External links * http://evilempireguild.org/guides/attacks.php Category:Formulas and Game Mechanics